Great News! Coffee May Undo Liver Damage Caused By Alcohol

When you wake up from a long night of imbibing beer, whiskey, and oddly-decorated drinks adorned by umbrellas and tiny swords, there are few remedies better than a nice cup of coffee. Only water, fruit juice (green), and maybe a McDonald’s breakfast can help settle a stomach ravaged by a night of partying better than coffee. It’s wonderful, this magical drink. There’s no doubt that any veteran drinker has developed a system for curing their hangover that includes coffee, but now science is telling us that coffee altruistically repairs our liver after poisonous alcohol hurts it.

Coffee, is there anything you won’t do for us? We love you.

According to Dr. Oliver Kennedy of Southampton University in the U.K., who was the lead study researching over 430,000 participants, drinking two cups of coffee led to a 44 percent lower risk of developing liver cirrhosis. You had me at “drink coffee,” but this is a cherry on top. Kennedy explained his findings to Business Insider.

“Cirrhosis is potentially fatal and there is no cure as such. Therefore, it is significant that the risk of developing cirrhosis may be reduced by consumption of coffee, a cheap, ubiquitous and well-tolerated beverage,”

And the more coffee you drink, the less liver damage you’ll acquire, according to the study. If you drink one cup, you’ll have 22 percent lower risk of cirrhosis of the liver. Drink two cups, and you’ll lower your risk by 43 percent, while you can expect 57 percent lower chance of cirrhosis if you drink three cups of coffee a day and 65 percent less with four cups.

The seemingly too good to be true study has a lot of work to be done before the brewing method, type of bean, or the time of consumption can be specified, but for now, this is great news for people who like to slowly kill their bodies with booze. Well, until the reality of a counterpoint comes into play.

Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York was also interviewed by Business Insider, and she’s raining on our parade (luckily we have those tiny umbrellas):

“Unfortunately, although coffee contains compounds that have antioxidant effects and anti-inflammatory properties, drinking a few cups of coffee a day cannot undo the systematic damage that is the result of being overweight or obese, sedentary, excessive alcohol consumption or drastically mitigate an unhealthy diet.”

Now, where do beer stouts fall in this study? No one has mentioned those. Are they essentially like drinking nothing beyond calories and deliciousness? Please tell us, science.